Stylus

　

"Send more Chuck Berry."

Steve Martin (April 22, 1978 – third season SNL)

　

　

　

1.

The Beautiful Boy entered the country comatose and shrink-wrapped in an anti-viral cocoon. He passed through customs insensate, like a crate of bottled olives or a case of anchovies in tins. An ambulance brought him to the Children’s Hospital at the harbor. His treatment was sponsored by the local Shriners Club in cooperation with Rotary International. The child was famous: Hollywood celebrities had admired him on Oprah and there were pictures of him on the front pages of newspapers and his Discourses in a Time of Conflict was climbing the New York Times bestseller list. He was supposed to have stopped a war in some country where war was the only thing that the people had. Before he fell ill, the Beautiful Boy had been awarded a prestigious prize and invited to Oslo. But sickness overcame him and he came to America for treatment unconscious and not expected to live.

The Beautiful Boy was not beautiful when I saw him. He was tiny with blotchy brown skin, blemished as if he had been scarred by innumerable spatters of hot grease. His hair had fallen out in clumps imparting to his skull a patched and motley pattern. The boy’s limbs looked fragile, like the crooked appendages of an ant or embattled centipede. The top half of his face was wizened, ancient-looking with jaundiced eyes rolled back in deep purplish craters under his wrinkled forward. But beneath the crest of his aquiline nose, the boy’s lips had ballooned into floppy scarlet combs like those you see on a rooster and his cheeks were puffed-out as if he were hiding food in them. The boy’s abdomen was distended above the brittle cage of his ribs and his buttocks were covered with yellow, moist ulcers.

"It is kwashiokor," the hospitalist told us during rounds, "complicated by an idiopathic infection that we think is viral." Kwashiokor, the hospitalist told us, means "sickness of the deposed child" in the language of Ghana. Sometimes, the syndrome is called "the disease of the second child." This means that the nursing mother can produce only enough protein to successfully nourish one child – accordingly, kwashiokor afflicts the child ousted from her breast or, perhaps, the second child who sucks but doesn’t get enough nutrition or, I suppose, both children if the mother is unable to choose between them, a maternal decision that is one of life or death. "Thankfully, we don’t see this much anymore in developed countries," the hospitalist said.

"So he was nursing?" a female intern asked.

"No – in fact he was an orphan," the hospitalist replied. "He’s actually 13 or 14 years old."

"He seems to be only three or four," the woman observed.

"It’s the nature of the illness," the hospitalist said.

The room was posted as infectious and we gawked at the sick child from a distance. The nurses wore white masks and the respirator sighed with a sound like wind through a barren, leafless tree and, outside, fog covered the harbor and the city so that we could see only shadows and an occasional light rotating through the gloom.

　

2.

It was about this time that there was a disturbance in the realm of the Forms. By this, I mean that the Platonic essences hypothesized to give meaning and order to our world showed signs that they were weakening and losing their authority. Certain more complex theorems in Euclidean geometry no longer held true and could not be proven any longer. Things that had once been equal to one another now were subtly unequal and principles that we thought to be constitutional could no longer be imagined with enough clarity to be implemented. Critics and jurists complained that no one knew what justice meant any more and, although the word "truth" could still be spoken, the application of that term had become uncertain – it seemed to mean whatever each individual speaker intended, but there was no common understanding. In fact, many things held in common now could not be established or seemed to have gone missing. Distances fluctuated – sometimes, the odometer told us that it was twenty miles by highway from one town to another; but on other occasions, the distance was measured as 17 miles or 25 and no one could determine whether the defect was in the world or the measuring instruments. Because measurements had become unreliable, prices fluctuated in unpredictable ways and the value of things seemed to have become ad hoc guided by markets that alternately surged or imploded. Borders collapsed because the lines drawn to define them were no longer lines, but rather fields, geometric anomalies, contested zones irradiated by uncouth energies. The failure of the borders meant that our cities were filled with strange people who didn’t speak our language and couldn’t understand our customs. Some of the interlopers were summoned into court for deportation, but these proceedings invariably failed because durations had become unstable and it was difficult to know when the litigants were supposed to appear and, if by chance, people did attend court when required to do so the Judges couldn’t rule because the laws upon which they were suppose to rely could no longer be found or, if found, could not be understood.

The seasons switched places and some people aged very quickly. Others didn’t age at all. The dead didn’t return to life, but the sick were often restored to health with sudden, even alarming, speed. Conversely, birds in flight sometimes dropped out of the sky dead and, indeed, not just dead but corrupted, decomposed almost to skeletons. Tremors shook the world and, sometimes, it seemed that the solid earth was about to vaporize into patches of smoke and cloud. The seas developed currents criss-crossing the oceans in ways that disrupted commerce – cargo ships bound for Senegal found themselves docking in Singapore and the jet stream tilted upward to boost airplanes away from the earth and into orbits deadly to their passengers. Constellations on which men had relied for tens of thousands of years went into hiding.

Curiously, these effects didn’t disturb most of us. Life went on only somewhat more unpredictably than before. Children were born and lovers made love and deals were done and the old among us became bright-eyed and grimly prophetic because they had forgotten the past but could remember the future with the greatest precision. It was the great era of art on earth. The human imagination was freed from the bondage that it had suffered under the tyranny of the Forms. Everything seemed possible. A hundred Shakespeares were at work simultaneously and their creations illumined this new, restless and unsettled existence with an eerie brilliance.

　

　

3.

People in shabby coats two- or three-times too large for them gathered in the hospital waiting room. They were disciples of the Beautiful Boy praying for his recovery. Sometimes, this crowd was so great that the corridors leading to Urgent Care were blocked and gurneys unloaded from ambulances were delayed in transit to the ER. Then, the police had to be called and the Beautiful Boy’s followers were expelled onto the street where they sang hymns and prayed with hands uplifted to the sun and blocked the ambulances bringing the sick and wounded to our hospital. It wasn’t a protest but more of a vigil and the opinion of our lawyers was that the First Amendment didn’t apply to vigils although case authority for this was murky and couldn’t be researched because the definitions of relevant terms had become as elusive as quicksilver. Police cordons were established and the situation was managed as best as possible without recourse to the Courts.

As the days passed, more and more people read the Boy’s Discourses and the immigrants in their battered, ill-fitting coats were joined by new adherents to the sect: Hollywood movie stars sometimes could be glimpsed amidst the faithful and housewives from the suburbs with students, the sort of earnest well-meaning folks you might expect at a Black Lives Matter fund raiser. I suppose the breadth of people represented was inspiring in certain ways but it was a nuisance to those of us who had to push our way through the singing and chanting crowds to get to work.

During this time, the Beautiful Boy remained comatose, although this state was now maintained artificially in order that the physicians could use aggressive therapies to treat the boy’s various fulminating infections. Every couple of days, the doctors would rouse the boy from his coma, look into his eyes, and grip his little hands. The boy’s eyes were said to be startling, immense and the color of green jade. It was thought that the intensity of his gaze related to all of the suffering that he had witnessed.

The Beautiful Boy came from what the newspaper and cable networks called "a failed State." It was a tropical land with volcanoes and jungles and beautiful beaches of white and black sand that appeared in photographs as the backdrop for sodden, shapeless corpses washed ashore after execution at sea. Both the rebels and the government had helicopters, although not in sufficient numbers to defeat one another, and, after dark, both sides transported prisoners a dozen miles out into the gulf and, then, threw them overboard to the sharks. The sharks had long since become surfeited on human flesh, a greasy and insalubrious diet that they now rejected, and so the bodies washed into shore and could be photographed documenting the brutality of one side or the other depending upon the coverage of the moment.

As far as anyone knew, the perpetual troubles in the Beautiful Boy’s homeland had arisen as a result of a well-meaning program of foreign aid. Before the first war in Iraq, the United States government discovered that contractual obligations required the military to purchase 800 small white pickup trucks, durable workhorses equipped with four-wheel drive, from a Japanese manufacturer. The contract had been negotiated during a previous war and forgotten about until the Japanese firm demanded payment and threatened delivery. The State Department routed the trucks to the Beautiful Boy’s homeland where they were to be distributed to remote villages and used in the production of artisanal brands of coffee. (At that time, efforts were underway to reduce the amount of land in the country devoted to narcotics horticulture.) The drug lords commandeered the trucks from the villagers shortly after their arrival. The State Department urged the government to military action to seize the vehicles that had gone missing. Troops dispatched from the capitol made a few desultory attempts to retrieve the fleet of white pickups but the drug cartels were heavily armed and easily repulsed the government forces. Under pressure to deliver results from the field, the army commander uncovered (or, perhaps, manufactured) evidence that the villagers had illegally sold the trucks to the narco-traffickers. Villagers accused of this treachery were rounded-up, summarily tried, and, then, executed. The executions were high-profile and intended to deter the villagers from cooperation with the drug lords, but, of course, had the opposite effect. Many young men from the villagers joined the narco-traffickers and an armed insurgency took shape. Some villages opted to assist the insurgents – these places were attacked by the government and the men taken onto helicopters to be "disappeared." Other villages took heed of the government’s reprisals and, so, announced allegiance to the capitol. Those towns were raided by the insurgents and the young men loaded at gunpoint onto rebel helicopters to be "disappeared." And, so, it went for twenty years, an endless, futile conflict that resulted in tens of thousands of orphans, one of whom was the Beautiful Boy.

The Boy had been raised in an orphanage of tin-roofed huts built on high wooden stilts to keep out the ants and scorpions. The compound was surrounded by concertina wire fences to deter casual raiding parties and defended by boy-soldiers armed with machete knives and sharpened hoes. A wealthy Seventh Day Adventist from the American Midwest who had made his fortune manufacturing garbage trucks supported the place and provided it with teachers and, even, a couple of nurses. The orphans housed in the place were taught to read and write and do some arithmetic and the most industrious of them were exported to America where they were given Green Cards so that they could work in the Seventh Day Adventist’s factory. Compelled to the hellish blood-feuding in the surrounding countryside, the orphanage was relatively idyllic. The children were taught to pray and Seventh Day Adventist missionaries proselytized them at intervals, although Catholic and Lutheran evangelicals were also permitted access to the flock. Discarded red and blue shipping containers in the port city were hauled up into the mountains to provide administrative offices for the operation. Several of the shipping containers were equipped with pianos so that the children could be taught to sing hymns and the folk songs popular in their country. It was in those resonant steel chambers that the Beautiful Boy first showed that he was a prodigy.

The evidence is now posted on You-Tube for all to see. Somehow, the Boy learned to play the principle themes from Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto No. 2. You can watch a wobbly cell-phone video of him seated at a big, dilapidated piano, scarcely able to reach across the keyboard in the cavernous shadow of the steel shipping container. His jade-green eyes seeming to shift color and intensity, the boy bows over the piano and his hands move like spiders over the white ivory – the performance isn’t flawless, but was sufficiently accomplished to allow professors at Juliard and Eastman to identify the melody and counterpoint as composed by Bach. Other cell-phone videos posted on-line show the Boy pounding out the theme from Beethoven’s Cavatina for String Quartet (Opus 130), played in a hitherto unknown transcription for piano – the identity of the composer who had transcribed the Cavatina for solo keyboard remains unknown. The Boy also played a suite of themes from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, also in a transcription that was blunt, practical, and no-nonsense, a schematic diagram of the music but one, nonetheless, eloquent enough to convey the essence of the work. The prodigy played popular music as well, some hymns and show-tunes, a couple of Christmas carols, and, something, that sounded suspiciously like Louis Armstrong’s version of the "Melancholy Blues" mingled with riffs from "Johnny B. Goode." All of that music was recorded by admirers on their cell-phones and, of course, I watched a few of his performances on You-Tube, although I never finished any of them, and, most of the snippets in any event were fragments – people were sufficiently interested in the prodigy to record a few minutes of his playing but not the whole piece that he performed. The piano wasn’t perfectly tuned and, at least, one key didn’t work resulting in strange inflections when he played and the hollow steel interior of the shipping container that had once contained small white pickup trucks made the piano sound like the ringing of a bell in a deep and echoing cave.

In the dialogue Meno, Plato’s hero, Socrates demonstrates that all important things that we know are merely memories, recollections of things learned in earlier lives, or vague memories of our encounters with the Forms. In support of this argument, Socrates contrives that a slave boy with no knowledge of geometry prove aspects of the Pythagorean theorem. As far as anyone knew, there were no professional musicians associated with the orphanage where the Beautiful Boy was raised. And, so, people wondered where the Boy had learned to play his peculiar repertoire. No one, as far as I know, suggested that the miraculous child was merely recalling those melodies or that the compositions that he played had been learned in an earlier incarnation. Perhaps, this was because the Forms had begun to blur and loosen and no longer held sway over the world. The most commonly accepted explanation was that a specific world-class cellist, once a principal in the capitol city’s philharmonic orchestra but now long "disappeared" in the country’s civil strife, had taken refuge in the orphanage and, perhaps, led the choir there for a few years and that the Boy had learned from that man. But this theory was admittedly speculative.



4.

Would his skills as a musical prodigy alone have made the Boy a famous celebrity? I think that’s doubtful. The world seems pretty much crammed with musical prodigies, particularly in this recent flowering of the arts. No, the Beautiful Boy was famous because of an event that occurred in the war in his country.

About eighteen months before he was brought to our hospital, insurgent forces raided the orphanage. In the blaze of noon, a half-dozen dented and rusting pick-up trucks, formerly white but now painted over with revolutionary slogans and patched with decals of cannabis-smoking skulls, appeared at the perimeter of the camp. Heavy-caliber machine guns were mounted on tripods bolted to the trucks’ pick-up boxes. The insurgents shot down the child-soldiers holding their machetes and sharpened hoes, killed several of the orphanage administrators, and, then, dragged the nurses into the woods to be raped. The rebels offered the kids in the camp the opportunity to join the insurgency and, even, let them execute a couple of the matrons responsible for discipline in the facility. At an assembly gathering the orphans together, the Beautiful Boy stood up against the rebels and harangued them. The leader of the insurgent raiders, a one-eyed commander with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher awkwardly slung over his back threatened the Boy with an axe. He told the onlookers that he intended to behead the Boy for his resistence. The Boy showed no fear and calmly continued with his admonitions, delivering, it seems, a sort of sermon. When the rebel leader raised the axe to strike the Boy dead, someone shot him. In the cell-phone video showing this encounter, you can see that blood and brains from the rebel leader spatters the Boy but that this doesn’t stop him from speaking. He continues to talk in a swift, high-pitched voice, peeping like a little bird that will not be silenced. After a few minutes, one of the rebels hoists him up on his shoulders and teetering there the Boy continues to speak and, then, everyone is applauding and dancing by jumping up and down and the person holding the cell-phone tilts it to show rebels casting down their arms, rifles and grenades dropped in the dust of the compound as the Boy continues to speak.

The rebels carried the Boy in triumph to a nearby village and the child spoke there again, calling for peace and reconciliation, and, then, more weapons were cast aside and the rebels joined with other forces and made a procession to the provincial capital. From the provincial capital, the Boy was brought to the capitol city itself and, there, he spoke to a hundred-thousand people, maybe more, and so the war in his homeland ended, both sides pledging a cease-fire.

Critics have been quick to remark that the cease-fire hasn’t been perfect. It is true that both sides have breached the peace in some ways and there have been some reprisals. But, by and large, the war is over and the cease-fire has held.

Six months after peace was established, the Beautiful Boy fell sick and was transported to our hospital where I was part of the team caring for him.

　

5.

The immigrant lady that cleans my house had seen cell-phone pictures, posted on You-Tube, of the Beautiful Boy confronting the burly one-eyed rebel leader. "Do you know what he preaches?" she asked me. I shook my head. She reproached me: "You can not treat what you don’t understand." And so saying, she asked me if I wanted her to translate what the Boy had told the insurgent troops.

My cleaning lady is a sweet person, very kind and soft-spoken, and she doesn’t usually made requests and so I asked her to tell me what the Boy was saying. She turned on my TV and found the You-Tube video of the Boy’s confrontation with the one-eyed rebel leader. Squatting near the screen and tilting her head toward the sound, she interpreted for me, putting her words for what the boy was saying.

"He says we must not disgrace ourselves or the message will not be told. He calls us travelers, people on a mission. We are the grabacion de oro – that’s what he says. The grabacion de oro – it means the recording of something in gold. He tells the soldiers that and they ask him questions. The recording in gold. He tells us to be good because we are made good and messengers, yes, messengers, like angels telling of the good. Some of them believe but others don’t. So he repeats that he is not the only messenger, that they are all messengers, that everyone is like an angel. He says the recording will be heard. One day, someone will listen. Some of them shout that they understand him. The night is dark, he says. The ground is cold – that’s what he says. He talks to them about the night and the cold and, then, how the sun will rise and how its rays go forth and that this is also the recording of gold – that is, the yellow beams of light from the rising sun. That they must put aside their guns and their hate and be obedient to their message, because they are all, each and every one of them messengers —"

And, so, she spoke for ten minutes and I listened without listening because it was all, more or less, the same, the ranting of a street preacher in a language that I wouldn’t have understood if it had been English, but this was not English exactly, rather an outpouring in which the high-pitched squeaky voice was all entangled with her rich molasses contralto. I nodded my head to signify interest but the great disturbances in the world occupied my thought and, to tell the truth, I was tired of thinking of the Beautiful Boy, tired of implementing the doctors’ orders over his insensate form at the center of all those radiating feeding tubes and catheters, monitors and IV lines, a whole network of connections and splices of which he was the center.

Something had stabilized. I didn’t drive through any dark zones on the way to the hospital and the parking place designated for me, a spot that had migrated from one corner to the other of the ramp, was exactly where I had left it. The fog had lifted a little and I could see into the harbor where the ships and the piers and the overhead cranes were all locked together in a blue and rust-colored medallion swathed in cloud like bandage.

The Beautiful Boy was sitting upright, a small brown-yellow totem in the center of the big, sprawling and disorderly hospital bed. Two nurses were inclined toward him and he seemed to be teaching them. Two elderly patients walking with their mobile IV units stood at the threshold of the room gazing at the Boy and the nurses. The decontamination suits were lying on the floor, inert and stiff as two cadavers.

"What’s happening?" I said. The room was still marked as infectious.

"It’s wonderful," one of the nurses said. "He’s awake."

The Beautiful Boy beamed at me and I saw the vitreous jade glinting between his eyelids. He was transmitting once more and his signal was vivid and complex, even orchestral. There was an alarm in the hallway. Several doctors pressed into the room and orderlies appeared to lead away the elderly spectators who were now in the way and I stood there, baffled at this sudden turn of events.

More people pressed into the room, unmasked and without protection, even though it was forbidden.

The Boy spoke feebly at first and, of course, I couldn’t understand him although the nurse with the brown skin seemed to hear what he was saying. She rose to her feet. The Boy was whispering at first, but, then, his speech became more distinct and I heard that his voice was cracking a little, wobbling between two different ranges, slipping from falsetto down to a deeper tone. _– It makes sense, I thought, his voice is changing. Then, other overtones resounded in the room and, for a moment, it seemed as if a great multitude of voices were speaking through the Boy’s lips and throat: a thousand tongues resounded there and I heard sounds that were like ringing a bell. The auditory hallucination passed. The little boy trembled as if he were cold. Someone hastened to put a blanket over his slender shoulders.

Relays of doctors arrived. The infection was gone. The Boy was moved into another room in the general ward. The streets outside the hospital were crowded with well-wishers. People brought stuffed animals and Bibles and set them against the wall of the hospital. The dull green sea-water lapping against the piers in the harbor smelled of roses.

I talked to the brown-skinned nurse in the hallway. "Dark was the night," she said. "Cold was the ground."

"What is that?"

"His words," she told me.

6.

The Forms returned, wobbly at first and uncertain on their feet, and took their place on their thrones. If I looked at a church, I saw through it to the Taj Mahal or Chartres. Dolphin came into the harbor and showed us their bright and flashing fins and I thought I saw an elephant on a side-street. In the park, a very old man sat on a bench next to a young woman holding a pink newborn baby against her breast. Standing beside the bench, there was a young man flush with the pride of youth and a middle-aged couple with sad eyes. All people in the world seemed to be gathered before me. The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius became irrational once more, infinite streams of numbers not repeating in any discernible pattern and radiating out across the universe. What had once been intelligible became intelligible again. Calibrations were confirmed.

　

7.

The phrase "dark was the night, cold was the ground" referred to something, but I couldn’t recall the source of those words. I looked them up on Wikipedia and found that these phrases were the name of a song by a Gospel blues singer named Blind Willy Johnson. The song is played with a knife on a bottleneck slide guitar and was recorded in 1927.

The astrophysicist Carl Sagan put a recording of the song on something called the Voyager Golden Record. This record was shot into space to announce the existence of humanity to the universe. The plaintive song by Blind Willy Johnson was one of 27 musical pieces stored on the record as exemplars of human culture. The record was also encoded with images of art, landscapes, anatomical diagrams, and pictures of architecture. Mathematical equations, chemical formulae, and schematics showing the location of our Earth in the Milky Way and, also, in our solar system were made part of the presentation. The record is shaped like an LP, 12 inches in diameter, and made of an alloy of gold. Instructions showing how to play the record are inscribed on the disk’s inverse side and a golden stylus was, also, provided.

The Golden Record was shot into space on the Voyager One probe in 1977. A duplicate Golden Record was dispatched to the Universe on the Voyager Two probe launched later in the same year.

Carl Sagan was asked about the inclusion of the instrumental piece by Blind Willie Johnson. He said: "The song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without a man or woman somewhere facing a similar plight."

　

8.

Studies began in the last week of his admission. Therapy was replaced by testing. The chart at the Boy’s bedside was, now, restricted access and, then, replaced by a computer tablet encrypted against everyone except for the new chief medical officer, a neurologist imported from the Naval Hospital at Twentynine Palms. The medical officer was a lithe, dark-skinned man and he spoke Spanish in a very soft voice and he was always accompanied by two male nurses who wore dark sunglasses and had strapped to their hips small weapons. At first, the medical officer attended the Beautiful Boy’s care conferences, sitting to the side, away from the table where the participants were meeting. He took copious notes on a small silver computer that he unfurled on his lap. Each day, the content of the care conferences became less and less substantive and, finally, someone asked if there was another conference regularly convened in which real data and chart entries withheld from us were discussed. The medical officer from Twentynine Palms smiled and said that this was a matter of national security and, therefore, off-limits as a topic of conversation. The Beautiful Boy’s treating physicians within the Children’s Hospital protested and the military doctor said that he respected their position and would meet with them privately after the conference. Shortly, thereafter, the protesting doctors were assigned other patients in the hospital or, even, transferred to facilities across the harbor.

The Boy was moved from the general ward into a suite of rooms clogged with electronic equipment and computer terminals. Apparently, anomalies had been detected in the Boy’s metabolism. In the cafeteria, radiology technicians whispered that unusual imaging equipment had been installed to monitor the patient’s electromagnetic aura – his L-field or Life-field as it was called. "They are treating him as some kind of broadcaster," one of the technicians told me.

The technician pointed to an Asian man sitting alone in a corner of the dining room. The man was sending a text-message on his phone. "That is a quantum medicine specialist," the technician told me. "We are supposed to cooperate with him with regard to our studies."

"What is a quantum medicine doc?" I asked.

"You got me," the technician said. "Some kind of nuclear medicine, I assume."

It was rumored that the boy was a source of bioluminescence. He was said to be emitting biophotons across a broad spectrum. The biophoton field was reported to be of unusual density and extent.

A couple years later, a friend told me that he was hiking in the peninsular mountains forty-five miles away and, atop a windy ridge, came up some soldiers wrestling with a big convex dish. The dish looked like the sort of thing that you might use to harvest satellite TV signals. When the men were asked about their assignment, they shrugged and said that it was subject to security clearance but had something to do with measuring biophoton emissions from a source in the bay.

　

9.

I don’t know when the Boy physically left the hospital. At the time of his discharge, he was sequestered from everyone except the military officer’s immediate staff. I assume he was whisked away in the middle of the night.

Litigation ensued. Several collateral relatives from the country where the boy had been raised appeared and filed lawsuits in Federal Court. The Boy was still a minor and the motive was, perhaps, related to the income stream of royalties from sales of the Beautiful Boy’s bestselling book. Various child welfare agencies intervened in the cases consolidated in Court and, then, government lawyers filed pleadings seeking to move the matter to a military tribunal convened in the old interment camp at Guantanamo Bay. The ACLU and other watchdog agencies also initiated lawsuits and there was a barrage of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation.

You would have to be a lawyer to keep track of these cases and I can’t tell you the outcome except to say that the Boy emerged from protective custody, now sleek and healthy and wearing expensive clothing. He toured the country as a motivational speaker and promised a sequel to his book. The Beautiful Boy appeared on all the major talk shows and was a fixture on Oprah and his agents, even, found him roles in a half-dozen movies. He made an appearance as a voice-actor on The Simpsons and hosted SNL not once but three times. The last time I saw him on TV, he had become just a little bit stout and I detected a slight pot-belly under his belt.

While visiting Australia, the Boy was involved in a bad car accident and it was reported that he had died. A comedy writer in New York claimed that the Beautiful Boy had been a hoax from beginning to end and that he had ghost-written the bestseller. Celebrities come and go and most people forgot about the Boy. But I had been part of the team that sheltered and cared for him when he was first brought into the United States in a coma and so I kept his memory in my heart.



10.

In Reno, there’s a cult that worships the memory of the Beautiful Boy. At one time, there were several thousand members, but now the group is much diminished in size. These people maintain a website where you can read the story of the Beautiful Boy and see cell-phone videos of him playing the piano or preaching the Gospel of peace to the one-eyed rebel leader with the RPG. Footage of the young man joshing with Oprah or performing the opening monologue on Saturday Night Live is not available – those images are still exclusively licensed to the networks.

The cult’s website maintains that the Beautiful Boy was an entity equivalent to Carl Sagan’s "Golden Record." A great and powerful civilization felt itself alone in the Universe. The scientists in that civilization worked together to create a signal to announce their existence to other sentient beings in the cosmos. Everything that was important about their culture, they recorded, encoding mountains of data into a single-source emitter. The Beautiful Boy was that emitter, a being designed to broadcast a message to the all the galaxies and worlds in the Universe.

The civilization created the most complete record that it could of its culture and sent this monument forth as the Beautiful Boy. Wherever he went, the Beautiful Boy emitted the signal encoded within him, casting forth an enormous electromagnetic field comprised of reality-simulating biophotons. The world in which we live and everything around us is this signal emitted by the Beautiful Boy. Some powerful alien intelligence is now reading the biophotons played-back by the Boy. This is the reason that we exist.

I don’t know that I believe this theory. Some people did once, but their numbers are diminishing.